In 1992, aged twenty-two and armed with a borrowed video camera, John filmed a friend's band at their first gig at The Boardwalk in Manchester. He walked in knowing nothing about bands, sound, lighting or the strange economy backstage — and walked out as their manager, on the simple grounds that the alternative was nobody. That night he also made a friendship that would resurface, decades later, at the frontier of music technology.
Within a year John had taken over a struggling rehearsal complex on Dumers Lane in Radcliffe and renamed it Apocalypse Studios. Fifteen bands rehearsed there, most of them broke. John's answer was a co-operative: every member of every band bought one ticket to a show and sold two more, so a single night at The Boardwalk could fill three hundred places with the scene's own energy. Bands stopped working in silos, went to each other's gigs, and the studio thrived. It was John's first working growth system — designed for musicians with no money and no industry experience, run on trust and simple arithmetic.
The alumni of that room went on to remarkable things. A young band who rehearsed at Apocalypse renamed themselves Elbow and became one of Britain's most garlanded groups — Mercury Prize, Brit Award, number-one albums, an Olympic ceremony. Others from that scene now play in some of Manchester's best-known acts, from the pioneers of acid house to the touring bands of post-punk legends. John went on to manage bands through European tours, run a record label with the frontman of one of the city's most influential groups, and later work at the heart of a much-publicised anti-fracking political campaign — technical producer of its nightly celebrity bed-in broadcast, filmed in the spirit of Lennon and Ono, while a Channel 4 series documented the campaign around him.